Been on the
diet for about a month. I don't feel like I'm losing weight very
quickly, but of course, that's a benefit, not a feature. Good things
happen slowly, bad things happen quickly. I noticed that I've been
really hungry the last few days. Then I realized how much bicycling I've been
doing. Of course the diet predicts that I'll be more hungry.
Eat to maintain setpoint. Exercise and you'll just get hungrier

Going to India for a week. I'll have to switch to hot sugar water,
but in the land of tea, that shouldn't be a problem. I'll also try
eating as many strange (to me) foods as I can.

I weigh too much. The weight itself isn't the problem. It's more that
the pad of fat in my belly interferes with proper taiji breathing. Have
tried various dieting schemes and of course none of them worked over the
long-run. Hope springs eternal, of course. What makes the Shangri-La Diet more likely to succeed is that it has a
theory for why diets fail based on evoluntionary biology.

So, I'm gonna give it a try. First dose of ELOO last night. Not so
hungry for breakfast, but of course that's probably me fooling myself.

I was going to make Clam Fritters (from the Joy of
Cooking recipe) for my honey, shortly after we moved in together.
Everything was going fine. I'd just separated out the egg whites when
the whole universe exploded. Well, okay, just our part of it.
Fortunately, we were both standing next to the kitchen counter,
because the kitchen cabinets fell off the wall, and would
have taken a dive for the floor except for our combined presence.

You might speculate that there was no ledger board underneath the
cabinets. You would be right. The only things holding them up were a
few flimsy screws. When we'd loaded it up with two people's worth of
dishes and food, they pulled further and further out until BLAMMO the
entire cabinet fell down. Right into the egg whites and bag of flour,
knocking the former into the latter, effectively gluing it to the
counter. No clam fritters for us; we ate pizza that night.

After the dust had settled, we stuffed soup cans under the cabinets to
prevent further movement, and checked each other for bruises. Fine.
Checked the brand-new speakers still sitting on the tops of their
boxes. Fine. Checked the dishes in the cabinets. Fine. Checked the
contents of the dish drainer, which was full of glassware, including
my class year graduation glass. Tragedy struck! My precious Burger
King Star Wars glass had shattered. Much pretend wailing and gnashing
of teeth followed, once we realize that that was the only victim.
Seemingly.

The next day the landlord's son came to put all right. He was a
klutz, but at least he was prompt about fixing things he'd installed
improperly, like the the hot-water tank which drew its hot water from
the bottom, the front door which "latched" but could be sprung with a
hip check, the interior walls which leaked conversation from one
apartment to another, and the ground-fault interrupter circuit breaker
which triggered when you turned anything on but didn't stop the flow
of electricity. He re-hung the cabinet, this time with a ledger
board.

We got ourselves breakfast, but when Heather poured her orange
juice, it started pouring onto her feet. She did a double-take, and
yes, she was pouring it INTO the glass. Turns out that that glass had
been a victim of the dish drainer of destruction. It had two small
puncture holes in the bottom, which didn't disturb the integrity of
the glass other than its ability to hold fluids.

That's a trademark of The
Stinking Rose (an ancient term for garlic, for no obvious
reason) in San Francisco. I went there in October of 1998, while
consulting in SanFran. I'd wanted to go there for years, but never
had the opportunity. So when my customer was taking me out to
dinner, and we were wandering around North Beach looking for a
restaurant (the problem not being a dearth, but a surplus), I hit upon
The Stinking Rose.

Well, when we walked into the restaurant, our noses were
immediately assailed by the perfume of garlic. Led to our seat past
an impossibly long garlic chain (they claim it to be the world's
longest), we opened the menus. Surprisingly, a number of the dishes
had no garlic in them. Presumably the inescapable smell was
sufficient seasoning for them. I located the "40 Clove Garlic
Chicken", and ordered it. Our waiter pointed out the minced garlic on
the table.

I split a roll and dug in with a spoon. As I heaped the garlic on the
roll, my customer (Vijay),
who's from India, said, with eyes ever growing wider, "Um, Russell,
that's a lot of garlic. That's a LOT of garlic. Russell, I like
garlic, and I wouldn't eat that much." Ignoring his sage (or was it
garlic?) advice, I dove in. Again and again I hit the minced garlic,
roll after roll.

By that point, when the 40 Clove Garlic Chicken arrived, it was
disappointingly mild. Tasty, yes, but not the whole garlic experience
I was expecting. Of course, cooking the cloves tends to mute their
effect.

Had an excellent dinner that couldn't be beat, went home, and got
up for the last half-day of the consulting gig. Nobody noticed
anything strange about the two of us (well, me more than him but
still). Vijay took me to the airport mid-morning, spending nearly an
hour in an enclosed car, without saying a word about garlic.

Flew home via Philadelphia to Ottawa. Heather (wife) was waiting up for me,
and forcefully noted that I reeked of garlic (remember, this is 24
hours later). In the morning, the children ran into the bedroom to
greet me. They stopped mid-step as if they had hit an invisible
force field. They said "Daddy, you stink!".

By itself, that's a great story. It gets better, though. A week
later, Heather was telling the story to Rebecca, a Friend of the
family. Rebecca said "Wait. What airline was he on?" Heather said
"USAir". Rebecca said "Friday?" "Yup." "Well, I was on the
next leg of that flight, and the whole airplane smelled of
garlic!!"

I used to say that there is no such thing as too much chocolate. I
was in Boston for the ECAC
Hockey championship some 14 years ago, and was wandering around
between the semifinals on Friday and the finals on Saturday. Stopped
at the Faneuil Hall
Marketplace. I picked up this chocolate creation which was six
inches high. The bottom was a chocolate muffin. It was topped with a
huge hunk of chocolate fudge covered with chocolate mousse. The whole
thing was dipped in a hard chocolate shell. Cost me $7. I couldn't
finish it.